The Comments Tell the Story

“Thank you for your amusing post..…it’s so unfortunate you are under pressure to post such inaccurate information…..You may find attending an anger management class to be valuable.”

Ironically, Mr. Gutnick worked for Nortel, my primary example of a fallen giant. I could well have used GoBeam, another failed company Mr. Gutnick also worked for.

Mr. Gutnick went on to make the point that Shoretel was not the "Next Nortel", citing Shortel's 21,000 customers. I must remind him that Nortel had sold over 1 million phone systems before they ended up in the Telecom Hall of Infamy.

An End User Customer

“I recently got a Shoretel quote and to me it looked like an old-school PBX vendor quote with tons of add-ons, options, extras and technical jargon. Bad move. I was able to do the same project with a newer PBX entrant for about 50% less than the ShoreTel solution...”

An Anonymous Commenter

"Why buy a proprietary hardware based solution that (like Shortel) that requires that you stack all these boxes together? They should follow in the footsteps of Mitel and Cisco with solutions that can be virtualized. There should be no need for proprietary servers in this day and age."

Brian Lemish

“This useless negativity actually puts Digium and the combative sales person in a negative position…this whole Asterisk thing is a nice experiment for the 20 user community that has lots of time to fiddle”.

Nice to see that not everyone agreed with my opinon of Shoretel and I thought that this was a good point. I don't wish to be seen as combative.

Conclusion

I found it refreshing to have a frank conversation about the ups and downs of going with a proprietary solution. By engaging the community, we get issues out in the open and have valuable discussions about problems that have dogged this industry for years.

Just as open source has had a huge impact on the computer industry, I believe it will have a similar impact on telephony. At Teledynamic Communications, we are committed to advancing open source as a viable and less expensive alternative to the overpriced, proprietary vendors many companies are stuck with today.

I welcome more healthy debate in the future.

If your company is located in the San Francisco Bay Area and you're interested in saving money on your next phone system, contact TeleDynamic. We Get It.

About the Author

Randy Kremlacek

President | Head Chef

Randy Kremlacek is president and Head Chef of TeleDynamic Communications and is a Digium Select Partner and 2013 Pinnacle Award winner. TeleDynamic Communications provides turnkey premises-based PBX and hosted PBX, SIP Trunking and Unified Communications. Randy Kremlacek prides himself on knowing the telecommunications industry as well as he knows his way around his own kitchen. READ MORE